Media pressure on diplomacy
It is notable that both Indian ministers and their Australian counterparts were forced into breathless reaction by the Indian media’s coverage of the ‘racism story’.
ASHOK MALIK and RORY MEDCALF examine the ways the which tabloid television constricts the space for India’s diplomats.
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Extracted from: “India’s New World: Civil Society in the Making of Foreign Policy” http://www.lowyinstitute.org/PerspectivesOnIndia.asp.
May 2011
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Twenty years after it began to deregulate its economy, India is a more externally engaged country than ever. A long-insular nation and society is expanding the definition of what constitutes foreign relations. Much of this change is driven by three new sources of pressure on India’s diplomatic establishment: an ambitious business community, a vocal diaspora and a rambunctious and aggressive news
media.
The support of Indian capital and Indian nationals abroad is now a legitimate expectation on New Delhi’s diplomacy. Indian politicians are regularly lobbied by voters whose relatives face very local challenges abroad. ‘Tabloid television’ stirs public emotion and constricts the space for India’s diplomats. These are realities of the new India that are not going to go away. Anyone who seeks to influence
Indian strategic and foreign policy will have to understand and work within this framework. The Indian policy establishment will need to adapt – for instance, through better coordinating or even merging its external affairs and commerce ministries.
If cleverly handled, the media, the diaspora and especially the convening power of Indian business peak bodies offer avenues for New Delhi to exert indirect influence on some increasingly important relationships, such as with the United States, Japan, Singapore and potentially Australia. Astute foreign partners can use these avenues to influence India’s worldview as well.
News media
India is in the midst of a news television boom unprecedented in broad-casting history. There are 113 round-the-clock news channels in the
country. Another 42 general-interest channels offer regular news bulletins. (16) News channels exist in English and Hindi as well as in a variety of regional languages across India.Almost every major state has three or four, if not more, news channels using the regional language of the province. The vast majority of these channels are accessible nationwide.
Like elsewhere, news television in India is a powerful medium that helps shape public opinion. Many news channels see themselves as not merely sources of information, but also as vehicles for entertainment, scandal and celebrity. With a handful of exceptions, most Indian news channels – in whichever language – have adapted the Fox News template from the United States. Their coverage of India’s place in the world is touched by jingoism. In middle India this often has bizarre consequences, as the news channels can be the typical provincial news consumer’s only window to the outside world.
It is important to see news television’s opinion forming role in a wider sociological setting. In social, economic or cultural spheres, India’s engagement with the rest of the planet has ballooned in the past 15-odd years. Take education. Fifty years ago, a small elite sent its children to Oxbridge. Twenty-five years ago, a slightly bigger upper middle class sent its children to the United States. These groups were English-speaking and often had prior experience – or at least knowledge – of the countries to which they were going.
In contrast, many of the students who have had challenging experiences in Australia in the past few years are from smaller towns and humbler backgrounds, with parents who have struggled and saved to pay for their education. A substantial number have left their state, let alone their country, for the first time. Even up until the early 1990s, India meeting the world essentially meant civil servants in Nehru jackets shaking hands with civil servants in suits. Today, it has many dimensions: business-to-business, tourist-to-host, student to-university. India finds itself a bigger economic and political power than at any time in its independent history.
Nevertheless, the intellectual tools and mechanisms that craft its worldview, its foreign policy and its sense of strategy remain rooted in another era. Cogitation on external relations is still the domain of a small New Delhi club of (retired) diplomats and generals. Business leaders have entered the room but they too, by definition, constitute the elite. There is therefore a vast gap between the self appointed foreign-policy elite and the demographic groups driving India’s engagement with the world, be they Jalandhar (Punjab) families that send their sons to college in Melbourne, or IT professionals from Pune (Maharashtra) who write software programs for clients in Minnesota. This gulf is untenable. In the coming decades, it will severely contract and a new equilibrium will inevitably set in. Until that happens there will be some turmoil, and the Australia episode was a nasty sampler.
As a society’s relationship with the world moves beyond the realm of government, it is calibrated by new intellectual mechanisms – think tanks, civil society institutions, academia and so on. They complement, even supplant, government groupthink. India lacks this infrastructure. Instead it has foreign policy pundits who speak a language unintelligible to the proverbial family in Jalandhar. This vacuum is filled by television. In the absence of cautious, institutionalised mentoring in the ways of the world, India makes do with primetime chat shows. The problem with the medium is it has only one, reductionist template: good versus bad, right versus left, patriotism versus treason, innocent Indians versus racist others. When it extends this framework to explaining the rest of the planet to ordinary Indians, the result can be guessed – and serves no nation’s national interest.
To Indian media consumers initiated into Australian society in 2009, that country must have seemed formidably scary. There was talk show discussion of a ‘white Australia’ policy that went out of business 40 years ago. Clips of Australian cricketers sledging or arguing with Indian, West Indian and Sri Lankan cricketers were juxtaposed with reportage of attacks on Indian students, as if one were dealing with a nation of all-purpose bigots. On one television show, (17) an anchor exclaimed that the Australian incidents had been preceded by attacks on Indians in Germany (an assault on a single individual the previous week), the United States (a reference to the ‘Dot-buster’ (18) attacks in the late 1980s) and Idi Amin’s Uganda, and wondered why the world hated Indians. It was a happily bitter universe of non sequiturs, devoid of nuance or context.
All the same, none of this can be wished away. India’s television-propelled middle-class opinion is a clear and present reality. It will continue to shape discourse that will harangue governments, demanding instant action and escalated rhetoric regardless of the international repercussions. It is notable that both Indian ministers and their Australian counterparts were forced into breathless reaction by the Indian media’s coverage of the ‘racism story’. This represents a phenomenon at once noteworthy and worrying. It establishes that news channels are democratising not just India’s domestic political debate, but also its global attitudes and the sources of its foreign policy.
What does this mean for those on the other side of the fence, the target countries of Indian news television’s reportage? Again, the Australian experience is illuminating. In 2009, a senior police officer in Melbourne famously described the violence against some Indian students as ‘opportunistic crimes’, flowing from economic rather than racial motivations and limited in numbers. As an official mandated to keep the peace in his community and city, he was absolutely correct in seeking to douse fires by pointing out that there was no raging ethnic conflict on the streets of Melbourne. Yet when clips of this officer’s statement were telecast on Indian news television, they were interpreted and sensationalized as insensitivity and denial. To many millions of Indians, an officer of the Melbourne police, addressing a local audience, was addressing the world.
Part of Canberra’s mistake in 2009 was its slowness in comprehending the huge shadow that Indian news television could cast upon the bilateral relationship. In contrast, Beijing that same year overestimated Indian news television and the degree to which it approximated government opinion. This led to a diplomatic fracas of quite another order.
Media and the MEA: Chinese whispers
In August-September 2009, Indian newspapers reported Chinese incursions in the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir, where India and China share a contentious border. Indian news channels soon picked this up as a sample of a new Chinese belligerence and a desire to ‘teach India a lesson’. In October, the Indian prime minister visited Arunachal Pradesh, a state in India’s northeast that Beijing has termed‘Southern Tibet’. China claims Arunachal Pradesh by virtue of its control of Tibet and by citing the fact that the Buddhist monastery in Tawang (within Arunachal Pradesh) had historically regarded the Dalai Lama in Lhasa as a spiritual
preceptor. In November 2009, the Dalai Lama – who lives in exile in India – visited Tawang himself and acknowledged that Tibetans had no claims on Arunachal Pradesh and regarded it as part of India. Beijing went apoplectic. In official statements as well as articles in government-controlled publications, India was denounced.
Meanwhile, in India, the news channels had gone to war with China. Conflict situations were simulated in studio discussions and the conversation was grossly exaggerated. Admittedly, the Indian media didn’t create the crisis. One view in New Delhi was that China’s verbal attacks on India through 2009 reflected domestic political jockeying within the Communist Party.
For its part, China chose to see Indian news television as representing not the views of individual journalists and talk-show hosts, or even of a section of Indian society, but of the government in New Delhi. Indian diplomats argue that this inability to differentiate between India’s private-sector media and the Indian government, and to see the former as being dictated to by the latter, is a frequent failing of authorities in Beijing. Still, Indian news channels have long provoked as well as fed upon a subliminal suspicion of China among the Indian middle classes. In this particular episode, public opinion and television channels fuelled each other. Media and public pressure grew on the government to talk tough and to ‘act’, however vague might have been the parameters of any action being sought. New Delhi was understandably reluctant to allow matters to escalate. Soon a verbal battle was under way, with Chinese government representatives, state media and semi-official proxies ranged against the Indian media, with the Indian government often reduced to a spectator role.
Eventually it ended in a setback for China, but in a wholly unforeseen manner. An Indian diplomat posted in Beijing at the time explains what happened:
As long as it was anger in the Indian media, China saw it as a provocation by India but not a public relations issue. But then the Western media – American, European and Australian newspapers and networks –began to pick up the story from the Indian newspapers and news channels. And suddenly China seemed to be bullying another neighbour, protesting at a holy figure like the Dalai Lama visiting a monastery. The ‘Peaceful Rise of China’ was again under scrutiny.
In these circumstances, some in the Indian external policy establishment probably ended up finding the media useful. Those quarters of the MEA that had always wanted to ‘hit back’ at China, but needed a roundabout approach due to the wariness of the Indian political leadership, came to consider the aggressive and sometimes ‘anarchic’ – to borrow a word from an Indian diplomat – Indian news television channels as an unintended ally.
NOTES
16 Author’s interview of a spokesperson of the media
markets monitoring agency TAM, June 2010.
17 A chat show on Doordarshan (DD) News in June
2009 in which the author was a studio guest.
18 Between 1987 and 1993, Jersey City, New Jersey,
and neighbouring areas saw attacks on Indian
women, identified by the bindi or ‘dot’ they wore on
their foreheads. These attacks came to be attributed
to ‘Dot-buster’ gangs.